Former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, vice-chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, said of the CRC's 1998 hearings in Santa Rosa CA, "It was as if there were two Santa Rosas and two Sonoma Counties…"
He was right. One Santa Rosa is the economic, political, and social elite that has owned and run our City and County for decades. The other Santa Rosa is all the rest of some 165,000 residents. This blog is dedicated to The Other Santa Rosa.

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

America votes for war and fascism

This cool, dark, rainy day reflects my post-election feelings.
Before I turn to the good news/bad news of the local election returns, I need to say something about the national economic and political context.

It looks like more than half my fellow Americans have voted for another four years of the Bush/Cheney neo-conservative Republican agenda.

Most of them live in the "red" states--almost the entire country, except for California/Oregon/Washington and the Northeast.
And a great many Americans in the "blue" states--including California--also voted to continue the last four years of Bush/Cheney policies and actions.

I once thought that if Americans ever elected a Hitler, he would have to be a smiling PR man like Ronald Reagan--not an angry neoconservative prototype like Barry Goldwater, a brooding paranoid like Richard Nixon, or a bumbling incompetent true believer like George W. Bush.

I thought and hoped Americans were smarter and more decent than that.
But forty years after Goldwater ran for President in 1964, America is in real trouble--and a lot of Americans have turned mean.

Forty years ago, the Democrats represented blue-collar workers and their unions, and stood for civil rights for Black Americans and other minorities.
But with post-WWII prosperity, the unions became powerful and the well-paid workers arrogant; they turned away from their party, and some became Republicans.

At the same time, big business was sending factories and jobs to the Third World, while creating low-paid "service" jobs for ambitious immigrants.
Blacks nominally achieved civil rights and integration, and soon were forgotten.

Needing bodies for their minority party, the fat cat Republican leaders held their noses, and took in the meanest elements of the Democratic Party--the ignorant religious and racial bigots of America's "Heartland" and "Bible Belt".
"Televangelists" began to preach an increasingly political message, and the corporate TV and print media became increasingly partisan.

Running from Republican attacks on their patriotism--and following the money--the Democrats swung to the right.
The result is that today's Liberal Democrat is no more "liberal" than Liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller was in '64.

So there's really only one national political party today--the Big Business Party.
Republican leaders own and run the national economy, and Democrat leaders manage it for them.
Rank and file Republicans and Democrats hold the remaining American jobs that immigrants can't do for lower wages, and pay almost all the taxes.

I was born less than a month after Pearl Harbor, and went to school during the McCarthy Era.
During most of my life, the United States has pursued a "Cold War" against the Soviet Union.
So almost all my life, I've been told that America was engaged in a war to the death between "freedom" and "Communism".

All that propaganda vanished recently, when the economic and political forces of international Capitalism finally bankrupted the Soviet Union.
Those same economic and political forces have nearly bankrupted America too.

Americans are generally ignorant about world history, economics, and politics.
They urgently need to know that the "multi-national" corporations that are the economic and political forces behind the Bush/Cheney Administration owe no allegiance to the United States-- or to any other nation on earth.

A conservative American from Kansas, General and President Dwight Eisenhower, warned us against the "Military/Industrial Complex" in 1961.
That complex came together to fight WWII, and it has grown stronger and more aggressive ever since.

It had commercial ties with Hitler's Germany, it rebuilt Japan, and it is developing the Third World today.
During and after the war, it took in elements of the Mafia and organized crime.
And since the war, it has taken in and used the CIA and related agencies--the intelligence bureaucracy President Truman created.

The U. S. fought North Korea and China when I was in grade school, and North Vietnam when I was in college.
The U. S. attacked Iraq under President George H. W. Bush, and now again under his son, the current President.
The current President Bush--with the approval of almost all the Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate--has invaded and occupied two weak sovereign nations, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Afghanistan is the route of a potential oil pipeline from the former Soviet Union to the Mideast, not to mention a major source of opium for America's heroin addicts.
Iraq is not only a major source of oil, but a potential base from which to attack other oil-producing nations.

Bush's initial excuse for invading and occupying those two sovereign nations was "Terrorism"--the bizarre and improbable 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City.
But the record indicates that the Bush/Cheney neoconservatives had been planning to invade the Mideast for many years prior to the 9/11 provocation.
And many good Americans suspect that the Bush/Cheney neoconservatives were at least aware that the 9/11 provocation was coming--and perhaps they orchestrated it.

No American President in my lifetime--including Richard Nixon, who was, in fact, a crook--has ever performed so many visibly un-American acts as has George W. Bush.
And no Presidential administration in my lifetime has ever been so great a threat to American Constitutional rights and freedoms.

It looks like more than half my fellow Americans just voted for the flagrantly un-American policies and actions of President George W. Bush.

About Me

Geoff is a Northern California native, who has lived most of his life since 1952 in Santa Rosa. He's a citizen, taxpayer, voter, and (thanks to inheritance) a homeowner. Geoff wrote nearly 50 major articles about City Hall for the monthly Sonoma County Environmental Impact Reporter between 1992-98. He strongly supports stringent enforcement of California's Brown Act, which requires elected and appointed officials to do most of the City's business at open and public regular meetings; and the Political Reform Act, which prohibits officials from acting on matters in which they have a personal financial interest. Geoff is also owner/moderator of the Yahoo group The Real Santa Rosa, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/therealsr/